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Writing About Love on Valentine’s Day

Blog, On Writing, What I'm Thinking

What is on a writer’s mind as he writes about love between his characters? I’ve been asked this question numerous times by book clubs.

You might ask the same question about any number of topics. What goes through your mind as you write about eating chocolate? Do you salivate as you write about cooking? Does your heart rate rise when your character chops wood or runs a marathon? Do you sweat? What about violence? How does it feel to get inside the head of a villain who harms an innocent bystander, or a family member, or a child?

Interesting questions all. But in deference to February 14, let’s talk about love.

The truth is, writers don’t want you to know what they think about as they write of love or sex. It’s too personal.

You can write a 500-page book rich in character and conflict, and there will be any number of readers who won’t be able to look you in the eye because the book contains two paragraphs describing characters involved in a sexual act. And others who will only want to ask questions about the two paragraphs. Better to be silent.

Plus, I suppose I suffer from a writer’s superstitious fear: Think too much about your writing process and whatever inspires you will go up in smoke.

Nevertheless, here goes. Giving up my privacy, revealing my secrets, jeopardizing my creative process. All in the service of Valentine’s Day. It’s true. Love makes us do ridiculous things.

So what do I feel as I write about love? The answer is consistent with the answer I provide to most questions about writing: the feeling is done by my characters. If I am touched by something a character expresses, I feel emotional. Sometimes I feel it deeply, and not infrequently, I tear up — just as anyone might in reading or hearing someone tell an emotional and personal story.

I have been fortunate to know love. I have loved parents, siblings, family, spouse. I’m particularly fond of my children and grandchild. I love my friends. And I’ve adored a dog or two. I’m sure my own experience of love informs how I write about it — just as my experience as a painter informs how I see, and I’m sure that perspective finds its way into how some of my characters describe what they see. But my life experience is mine, and my characters’ life experience is theirs.

In Bloodlines, when Michaela talks about the love she feels for her lost son, I can imagine what it is to lose a son the way she does — but to write about it I have to find my way into her head, and to feel what she feels based on her own experience of love. Any other character losing a son would experience the loss in his own way, and would express that loss differently.

There’s no way to fully separate writer from character. We are part and parcel of each other. I bring my own experience of love to the party, and each well-drawn character brings a personal history to the party, too, which determines how she feels about what happens to her. The magic of fiction is that it is the marriage of these two personal histories that the reader receives — and, in turn, blends with his or her own experience of life and love.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash